Hi, I’m Jim Smith, but if you gave a crap who I was you would probably just read my LiveJournal, so let’s move on to more pressing matters. And on a day like this, I’m obviously talking about Superman renouncing his US citizenship in Action Comics #900. Because, hell, what else is going on?

If you haven’t read the story, here’s the rundown of “The Incident” by David S. Goyer: For about the twentieth time Superman decided it’s not enough to beat up supervillains, so he flew to Tehran for a peaceful demonstration against the government crackdown on protesters. The White House has kittens over this, and Superman decides that if he can’t act abroad without being seen as a tool of American foreign policy, he will simply disavow his citizenship.

First, Superman’s bluffing. Technically he has no official citizenship to renounce. Clark Kent does, and he hasn’t renounced anything. I’ll spare you an analysis of whether Clark is just Superman in disguise or vice-versa, but the point is, Ma and Pa Kent tricked the government into putting Clark on the grid, not Superman. It’s Clark who has a Social Security number, pays taxes, etc. Frankly I’m not sure the government has cause to believe Kal-El is even a US resident, let alone a citizen. Symbolism aside, Superman disowning his citizenship is about as relevant as Aquaman and Mera applying for a marriage license in South Dakota.

In any case, this is obviously not a repudiation of “the American way,” or even a rejection of American exceptionalism. (I doubt Superman believes in American exceptionalism, but that’s neither here nor there.) Superman’s primary reason for doing this is to provide the US government plausible deniability when it is blamed for his actions. Superman as a character is designed to try to solve every problem put in front of him, particularly the problems that require immediate action. That ideology resonated with Americans in the ’40s and ’50s facing looming, unavoidable conflicts against evil empires. But by now I think even the most hawkish neocon is starting to realize the US has to pick its battles carefully. Superman can’t and won’t be as cautious, though; so, being a nice guy, he’s not going to let that cause trouble for his adopted country if he can help it.

Second, I think Superman is being a bit foolish. (He says as much himself in this story.) His reaction to the Iranian protests is consistent with his character, but it’s not a particularly good idea. He can address the UN all he wants, and renounce everything from his citizenship to his little red underoos, but people would still perceive him as an American acting on behalf of American interests. (In fact, on the last page of Action #900 he’s posing with the Stars and Stripes. Oops!) Even if he could divorce himself entirely from the US, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would still be calling him a pawn of the Zionists or something, and then what’s he going to do?

The thing is, Superman is not an idiot, and he shouldn’t have to blunder into these lessons like he’s never stopped to think about it before. (I would think just being a journalist would provide enough insight on the limits of brute force for him to already have a fully-formed philosophy on this stuff.) It’s all fine and good for Clark to ask himself why he always punches bad guys and never tries to solve real humanitarian crises, but the bottom line is that these questions have pretty clear answers. Superman punches bad guys because it needs to get done and he’s good at it, and he doesn’t tackle complex sociopolitical issues because he’s not qualified and he knows better. And frankly, ending famine and war isn’t going to mean much if Darkseid or Brainiac are left alone to destroy the planet, so I’d like to think Superman has his priorities in order and carries his end of the load just fine.

Third, I strongly doubt this was meant to go anywhere. Then again, I can’t fault anyone for believing otherwise. The general public is trained to think that, when the media covers a comic book plot point, it’s the start of a major event. (Captain America is dead! Wonder Woman got a new costume!) Comics fans are trained to think that a story appearing in, well, a comic book is going to have repercussions on the next issue. But the fact is, Action Comics #900 has six stories, and only the first (by regular series writer Paul Cornell) is continuing into Action #901. The rest are clearly fluff pieces, not so much intended to leave a mark on the Superman mythos as to get some big names (Damon Lindelof, Paul Dini, Richard Donner, etc.) into the anniversary event. David S. Goyer is writing the upcoming Superman film, but hasn’t been attached to any Superman comics beyond this one, so I’m pretty sure the goal here was never so much “Kick off a bold new direction for Superman!” as it was “give Goyer eight pages to do whatever, so we can hype his name in the credits.”

It’s possible that by now DC is scrambling to capitalize on the publicity, and Goyer may have guaranteed himself (or if he’s unavailable, somebody) a surefire 12-issue arc somewhere in the near future. There’s certainly potential for a storyline about the controversy surrounding Superman’s decision. Even so, I don’t foresee this having any lasting impact on the character. This has been a ongoing problem for the Man of Steel for years now. You know nothing he’s learning in his little walk across America is going to matter in six months, you knew a whole planet of Kryptonians was living on borrowed time, and you knew when Clark adopted a son that they’d find some way to undo that almost immediately. I give the citizenship matter eighteen months before it is either completely resolved or completely dropped.

Mind you, I don’t have a problem with Superman stories either upsetting or resetting the status quo. But the goal in this genre should be to achieve the illusion of change–you shake things up enough to make the characters’ lives feel real, but not so much that the brand becomes unrecognizable. Superman has had a lot of trouble with this. He’s perceived as having been too static in the old days, so modern writers are overly concerned with telling a groundbreaking deconstructionist Superman story. So now the problem is that it’s become difficult to find stories that are simply about Superman going to amazing places and doing amazing things like he’s supposed to. I don’t mean to single out Goyer–he only had about eight pages to work with and his story really did turn out quite good. But I can’t help but notice that Action Comics #900 features a lot of soul-searching and relatively little action.

12 users responded in this post

Thank you for this. I have been trying to convince everyone on the internet of the third and seventh paragraph for days. I don’t really care all that much about Supes pretend citizenship, but the OMG SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET reflex is strong in me.

Given the fact that he spends the bulk of his time specifically protecting Metropolis, it seems likely that the U.S government would come to the logical conclusion that Kal-El is, in fact, a U.S resident. Prior to him making certain details of his personal life and history public (I don’t know what the timeline on that is in current continuity), it is likely that they assumed he was just an extraordinarily powerful metahuman rather than a refugee.

Given Superman’s intelligence, introspection, and general attitude, I quite agree with you that he would logically be aware of the limits of brute force and be extremely reluctant to involve himself in complex sociopolitical and economic problems, or wars and atrocities taking place half a world away in situations he has neither the time nor the understanding to fully control.

And that’s just the Watsonian reasons for why this is kinda stupid. The Doylist reasons are that Superman and his cadre of buddies fight SUPERVILLAINS and/or universal calamities. There’s seventy years worth of tradition and narrative arcs built around that. There’s a tradition for telling stories about taking the idea of a Superman-equivalent and applying as much of a real world filter on it as possible, but not using the Man Himself.

I haven’t ever read Superman on a regular basis. The closest i’ve come to being near his stories is picking up volume 6 of a run by some author. But you may have, in those last 2 paragraphs, hit on why i haven’t even tried to read Superman recently. Thank you for the well written article.

Y’know the recent GI Joe movie bent over backwards to make the team (‘A Real American Hero’) international including British and Moroccan members and putting their base in Egypt. Largely this was because the studio was afraid of losing the international market if the film was too American.

I wonder if that’s the subtext of this story?

That being said having Superman spend a year outside the US would be a lot more interesting than him walking across America.

Clark Kent spent several years travelling the world experiencing other cultures and in his reports building up the portfolio that got him the job at the Daily Planet. He’s then spent years as Superman since his debut. These days he knows that jumping in and grabbing Hitler and Stalin wouldn’t work and they even had a story with him learning this. He disarmed two opposing forces and they picked up rocks and sticks to fight. Another place he carried in tons of relief supplies and the local dictator said thank you, and they would handle the distribution, and take their cut as his men would be watching so no refugee would dare take any without permission.

But my main problem is more that leaving aside whether Superman would try to solve the complex sociopolitical problems or not is that by the nature of comics he CAN’T. They have a very fragile structure of being the real world “except” with superheroes and aliens and magic. The problem is that even small things can change a lot and some of the things Superman could solve even within his traditional purview of stopping crimes and disasters are not small things. I am sure you can think of your own examples.

Though the fact I am reluctant to give examples is another problem. One thing to think to yourself that it is a shame there is no real Superman when you see something nasty on the news and another thing to use him solving that trouble as the basis of a story. It seems disrespectful to those that died and those with only the powers and abilities of mortal men who have done their best to help.

So Superman gets more freedom of action as he has given the US government (not very) plausible deniability. But this freedom is to do things that he knows will not work, that would be disrespectful as a story to the real problems, and which, to whatever degree his efforts succeed or fail, would alter his world and further strain the suspension of disbelief that it can still be “ours…except with”.

I remember reading in my youth (in some superman trivia book or something like that) that Superman was given US citizenship by an act of Congress. Of course, that was pre-CoIE, so I guess that doesn’t count (or the Superman Annual tie-in with Armageddon 2000 where Superman runs for President and STAR Labs determines that he was placed in his rocket from Krypton as a fetus, so the Supreme Court rules his landing in Kansas constitutes his ‘birth’ for purposes of Presidential eligability. That story is a good deal more amusing in retrospect).

Still, Superman’s ‘home’ as far as the public is concerned is the Fortress in Anartica (or maybe the Watchtower in orbit). And the “Justice League” does have Wonder Woman, who’s not American, so who knows.

Although the Wonder Woman with the eagle top and the star-spangled tights sure seemed pretty American.

I remember an old issue of Action Comics where Superman was going around doing everyone’s job, and some magical being had to force him to stand by and let firefighters, cops, etc., take care of things. I recall the being explaining that “sometimes a MAN is needed… NOT a Superman”.

This was before we had women being cops and fighting fires and such, clearly.

Yeah, but Wonder Woman’s stars-and-stripes outfit is an amazonian tradition, right (taking the colors of the host nation as a sign of respect, I think).

I remember Superman being tried by the Guardians for ‘retarding the development’ of the human race by doing too much for them and his sentence was that he couldn’t help people or face exile. It didn’t stick.

Isn’t this why Lex Luthor remains Superman’s biggest nemesis? Superman can run around the world battling baddies and saving the planet for decades, and people still have trouble accepting him.

Luthor runs for President and wins, no problem.

Read the alternate history “Red Son” and you get to see Luthor run off, save capitalism, and roll back the Red Tide purely to spite his Commie alien rival.

Luthor has the social and political expertise that Superman lacks. It’s not unreasonable to believe rogue political leaders don’t have a more limited, but at least comparable, type of skills. The kind of villains you can’t punch your way to victory against.

Although, in all fairness, I can’t help but think that a fair number of third world countries would be ruled by meta-humans as either direct dictators or from behind the scenes.

Wait, what? There was media coverage on this?!? Superman declared himself a “citizen of the world” back in the 50’s/60’s. It was like two panels long. Each member of the U.N. made him an “honorary citizen”, so he could operate in their country as needed. that’s why “The Incident” struck me as kind of silly, stretching two panels into eight pages.